How to format your references using the The Lancet Infectious Diseases citation style

This is a short guide how to format citations and the bibliography in a manuscript for The Lancet Infectious Diseases. For a complete guide how to prepare your manuscript refer to the journal's instructions to authors.

Using reference management software

Typically you don't format your citations and bibliography by hand. The easiest way is to use a reference manager:

Paperpile	The citation style is built in and you can choose it in Settings > Citation Style or Paperpile > Citation Style in Google Docs.
EndNote	Find the style here: output styles overview
Mendeley, Zotero, Papers, and others	The style is either built in or you can download a CSL file that is supported by most references management programs.
BibTeX	BibTeX syles are usually part of a LaTeX template. Check the instructions to authors if the publisher offers a LaTeX template for this journal.

Journal articles

Those examples are references to articles in scholarly journals and how they are supposed to appear in your bibliography.

Not all journals organize their published articles in volumes and issues, so these fields are optional. Some electronic journals do not provide a page range, but instead list an article identifier. In a case like this it's safe to use the article identifier instead of the page range.

A journal article with 1 author

Zasloff M. Antimicrobial peptides of multicellular organisms. Nature 2002; 415: 389–95.

A journal article with 2 authors

Rabosky DL, Sorhannus U. Diversity dynamics of marine planktonic diatoms across the Cenozoic. Nature 2009; 457: 183–6.

A journal article with 3 authors

Vaupel JW, Carey JR, Christensen K. Aging. It’s never too late. Science 2003; 301: 1679–81.

A journal article with 7 or more authors

Li J, Mei Z, Liu L, et al. Probing defects in nitrogen-doped Cu2O. Sci Rep 2014; 4: 7240.

Books and book chapters

Here are examples of references for authored and edited books as well as book chapters.

An authored book

Evans PW. Top Hat. Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

An edited book

Bacardit J, Bernadó-Mansilla E, Butz MV, Kovacs T, Llorà X, Takadama K, editors. Learning Classifier Systems: 10th International Workshop, IWLCS 2006, Seattle, MA, USA, July 8, 2006 and 11th International Workshop, IWLCS 2007, London, UK, July 8, 2007, Revised Selected Papers. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2008.

A chapter in an edited book

Koster A, Koch F, Bazzan ALC. Incentivising Crowdsourced Parking Solutions. In: Nin J, Villatoro D, eds. Citizen in Sensor Networks: Second International Workshop, CitiSens 2013, Barcelona, Spain, September 19, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2014: 36–43.

Web sites

Sometimes references to web sites should appear directly in the text rather than in the bibliography. Refer to the Instructions to authors for The Lancet Infectious Diseases.

Blog post

Andrews R. Why Is Hawaii Bent? IFLScience. 2016; published online May 15.

Reports

This example shows the general structure used for government reports, technical reports, and scientific reports. If you can't locate the report number then it might be better to cite the report as a book. For reports it is usually not individual people that are credited as authors, but a governmental department or agency like "U. S. Food and Drug Administration" or "National Cancer Institute".

Government report

Government Accountability Office. [Comments on Fly America Act Interpretation]. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994.

Theses and dissertations

Theses including Ph.D. dissertations, Master's theses or Bachelor theses follow the basic format outlined below.

Doctoral dissertation

Fay C. Aposematic Variation and the Evolution of Warning Coloration in Mammals. 2017.

News paper articles

Unlike scholarly journals, news papers do not usually have a volume and issue number. Instead, the full date and page number is required for a correct reference.

New York Times article

Schwartz J, Shear MD, Paulson M. New Tack on Unrest Eases Tension in Missouri. New York Times. 2014; : A1.

In-text citations

References should be cited in the text by sequential numbers in superscript:

This sentence cites one reference ¹.
This sentence cites two references ^1,2.
This sentence cites four references ^1–4.

About the journal

Full journal title	The Lancet Infectious Diseases
Abbreviation	Lancet Infect. Dis.
ISSN (print)	1473-3099
ISSN (online)	1474-4457
Scope	Infectious Diseases

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